Cultural assumptions in Mexico: Lesson # 1
Mexican schools might not need what you think they need.
We extranjeros (foreigners) arrive in Mexico carrying unknown baggage which we don’t unpack until we notice the poverty, the corruption, the lack of services, the shoddy education. We start wanting to do our bit to fix things, especially if we’re staying for a while. “Why can’t Mexicans enjoy more of what we have?” we ask, and we set about solving problems just as we would at home. Mexicans are very sweet about accepting unasked-for assistance, even though they know our solutions often don’t stick.
The first year Betty and I volunteered in the village school of Chacala, the lovely teacher Veronica wrote class lessons on a board so pitted and used that the words could hardly be seen against the greyed-out background.
“Let’s paint the blackboards,” Betty said. “I can hardly make out what she writes.” Betty went to school on the small island of P.E.I. (Prince Edward Island) on Canada’s east coast. She claims that as kids they got very excited whenever the blackboard was fresh. The following weekend, with P.E.I. paint Betty’s sister brought down, we performed a guerrilla operation in the school.
The kids gasped when they saw the fresh blackboard. Just as Betty had predicted, a clean coat of paint was almost a miraculous event. Betty and I worried that the surface might be a little smooth and that the chalk wouldn’t stick, and we watched anxiously as Veronica approached the board. She picked up the chalk and in large letters she wrote SEXO. “How many of you have a sister or brother with a baby?” she asked, turning to face the children.
Two hands went up. Two hands! In a primary school with less than 20 kids.
“Cousins with babies?”
More hands.
“You must be very careful not to have a baby too young,” Veronica said, her hands on the shoulders of one of the girls who’d raised her hand. “Does your sister find it hard with a baby?”
She taped a poster of male and female reproductive organs to the top of the blackboard and began an informative and direct lesson on sex.
I leaned over to whisper to Betty. “The chalk’s sticking well.”
“Girls,” Veronica concluded, after explaining not only the mechanics of sex but also the desire, “You must learn to say no. And boys, you must learn not to ask.” When she turned to clean the board for the next lesson, the sex was so hard to rub off we had to wet a rag.
Wanting to help, Betty and I regularly bought supplies for the school — paper, crayons, puzzles, curtains, a map. When Betty brought a mechanical pencil sharpener from Canada, it was a huge hit. We screwed it to the teacher’s desk, and the sharpener got so much use that the corner of the cheap pressed wood crumbled within days. After that, the sharpener sat loose on Veronica’s desk. The kids fondled it like an object of treasure, and every available pencil in the room was sharp.
We wanted to do something more. Something bigger. “Why don’t we wait until we have enough Spanish to ask?” Betty wisely said. It took about a month for us to be able to say, “¿Qué necesitas? (What do you need?)”
Not one thing on Veronica’s list was what we expected.
At the top of the list was a whiteboard. “Can you afford to buy markers?” Betty asked.
Veronica opened her purse and pulled out an inhaler. “I’d rather buy markers than these,” she told us, holding up a plastic bag full of medication. “The chalk dust is not good for the children either.”
We bought the whiteboard, but we didn’t really learn the lesson.
The following year, we began a very ambitious healthy-living program called Saltamos en la Salud (Let’s Jump into Health). We looked at the kids and saw bad diets and not enough exercise, so we planned a one month blitz of games and activities aimed at raising the children’s awareness of healthy habits. The program was to start in earnest in January, after the Christmas break, and we prepared for it by generating lists of good and bad behaviour on the board.
Under ¡Bueno! the kids listed drinking water, playing soccer, brushing your teeth and smiling; under ¡Malo! they wrote drinking Coke, fighting, not doing your homework and eating Sabritos (chips). I made a Snakes and Ladders game called Serpientes y Escaleras from their lists. Land on a glass of water and you shot up a ladder from Square 2 to Square 14. Land on the bullying square and you slithered down a snake’s tail from Square 65 to Square 10. One young boy, Alexis, broke my heart when he came in after the weekend and unrolled a crumpled handmade Serpientes y Escaleras from his backpack. He’d filled in each of the 108 squares with behaviours from our list. Rummaging in his backpack again, he fished out an empty cigarette box and shook it over my hand. Two tiny, carefully constructed paper dice fell out.
‘Let’s Jump into Health’ ran into the reef of cultural assumptions the day after school ended for the Christmas break, when the children invited us to that year’s Posada Navideña. Posada means “inn” or “hostel”. The Posada Navideña is a nine-night re-enactment of Mary and Joseph’s search for refuge in their flight to Bethlehem. Every Christmas, for the nine evenings leading up to December 24, a different family or restaurant hosts a party with candies and piñatas.
The first Posada was held in an uneven square of weeds between two cinderblock houses with corrugated tin roofs. The space was lined with plastic chairs and flanked at the back by a rusting truck with four flat tires. Daniel’s mother was ladling agua fresca (fruit-flavoured water) from clear plastic vats when we arrived. We were offered a choice of agua de jamaica, made from dried hibiscus flowers, or horchata, a milky concoction of ground almonds and sesame seeds and rice water. Horchata’s surprisingly good. I would definitely recommend it.
When the kids arrived, Mary was wearing a pristine white gown and a gold-foil halo, Joseph had a beard and a staff, and the other kids were dressed as manger animals and kings. The children sang the Posada song without much enthusiasm. The lyrics were something along the lines of “We are seeking shelter, will you let us in?”, to which the receiving hosts were supposed to sing, “You have found a shelter here,” but the kids headed straight for the drinks and snacks.
The whole point of the Posada, from the childrens’ point of view, is the piñata, which two teenagers were now stringing to a tree. Suddenly, more kids appeared from nowhere. The first piñata was a red-suited Santa Claus, and the children lined up in front of it in order of size. One of the teenagers tied a blindfold around the eyes of a little boy, handed him a stick and spun him around three times. The child was so small he wasn’t much threat to the piñata, nor was the next or the next. As the kids increased in age and size, the mothers began encouraging the children to move back. The older kids started to do real damage and whacked poor Santa with force. The teenagers yanked on a rope attached to the piñata, jerking it out of range to make it harder for the hitters. One of the kids made contact, and a leg dangled. The kids edged closer, scrabbling for the few candies that had fallen from the leg. Now the next boy, blindfolded and staggering after his spin, swung the stick wildly.
Dale, dale, dale (Hit it, hit it, hit it), the kids chanted as the stick hissed through the air. Betty cocked an eyebrow and leaned toward me. “All fun until somebody loses an eye.”
An arm flew off. Another leg dangled.
Cezár, a skinny little boy in Grade 1, stepped up for the blindfold. The kids positioned themselves strategically. It was clear from their attitude that they knew this was the end. Cezár connected on his first swing and sent the piñata careening so high it snagged in the branches of a tree. Cezár was up the tree to free it, then right back down with the pole in his hand. The circle of kids closed around him and began chanting Ce-zár, Ce-zár, Ce-zár.
WHACK! A direct hit. Santa swivelled on his cord, and candies flew from his belly. Another whack and Santa was destroyed. Candies flew all over the yard. The kids dove for the sweets, stuffing their mouths and their pockets, even as the teens started stringing up a second piñata. When not a single candy was left on the ground, the kids started swinging phantom bats in preparation for another round.
“And this whole scene will be repeated every night until Christmas,” Betty observed. “Jump into Health is doomed.”
The program kicked off the after the Christmas break. We’d already divided the kids into teams to compete against each other; we’d purchased ‘Passports’, paper exercise books to use as daily health journals; we’d asked visiting friends to bring down balls and skipping ropes and frisbees; and we’d ordered prizes for the daily winners, rubbery little bracelets in the form of dinosaurs and animals called ‘Bendy-Bands’, then all the rage in LA.
We’d organized a dental program and a diabetes prevention program, which began with a talk from the young doctor completing his practicum in Chacala. The doctor had seemed both concerned and interested in our planning meetings, but his chat to the kids was so numbingly boring I wondered if he’d ever been a kid himself. We were off to a bad start.
The kids’ enthusiasm picked up when we introduced our performance incentives: stamps and stickers and the rubbery ‘Bendy-Bands’. They used their ‘Passports’ to record what foods they ate, what good deeds they did, and the ways in which their behaviour might be improved. For the first week, they were quite diligent.
Then, strangely, everyone began reporting perfect behaviour — no soft drinks, no greasy food and teeth brushing 3 times a day. They began to haggle over the Bendy-Bands like barbarians. I held back a few rewards in favour of honesty and fair play, but in retrospect I think I should have been more liberal.
Saltamos en la Salud wrapped up with a treasure hunt with the kids running all over the school ground. The “treasure” included toothbrushes instead of candies.
A month after we’d finished our program of skipping and brushing and chasing balls, I saw Ubaldo and Alexis walking to school swigging from a litre of Coke. Ubaldo flashed me a wry glance before stuffing the bottle into the back of his pants, hastily covering it with his shirt. “Aqua (water),” he smirked, giving me a thumbs-up as they passed.
Did we make a difference? Not really, but perhaps the message is in there somewhere.
This is the 5th story in the weekly publication A Remarkable Education: Lessons Learned in a Mexican Rural School.
In the next story, I describe what I learned teaching English to the village vendors.
In the previous story, I looked at how children learn in the absence of teachers and resources.
Starting in the winter of 2009, Diane Douglas volunteered three years in the two-room school of the fishing village of Chacala, north of Puerto Vallarta. Since 2012, she’s been working to improve online learning at el Colegio Patria, a remarkable rural school in the poor, agricultural town of Las Varas.
